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Thursday, December 10, 2015

We LOVE mushrooms in our house (well, at least most of us do)! The other night I really wanted to make Stuffed Mushrooms, but unfortunately I couldn't find a "perfect" recipe for my family. I printed out a bunch of recipes I found on Pinterest and then created my own and loved the result, so I wanted to share it with you!

Vegan Stuffed Portobello Mushrooms

Ingredients:

6 large portobello mushroom caps

1 cup of Instant Brown Rice

1 small onion, chopped well

1 small red pepper, chopped well

2 cloves of garlic, minced

2 roma tomatoes, diced

1 tbsp fresh basil, chopped

5 oz. fresh spinach

1/4 cup of Panko bread crumbs

salt and pepper, to taste

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Pop the stems out of the mustroom sand arrange the caps on the bakingsheet.

2. Prepare Instant Rice.

3. While rice is cooking, heat a skillet on medium and add a little water (or oil if you prefer). Add the chopped onion, pepper, and garlic and heat for about 4-5 minutes stirring continuously so they do not stick to the pan.

4. Add in the tomatoes, basil and fresh spinach and heat until spinach is broken down. Season with salt and pepper.

5. Remove from heat and add prepared brown rice to the pan to combine and allow to cool for a few minutes.

6. Spoon filling into each mushroom cap as evenly as possible. Top with bread crumbs

7. Place in oven and bake for 15-20 minutes or until filling is hot and mushrooms begin to soften. Serve hot.

Friday, December 4, 2015

A big part of success in our business is staying motivated. And, that motivation comes from within you.No one else can motivate another. Start to motivate yourself by finding your why; your inner passion; desire and drive. Get those goals down in writing.

Write out a simple daily action plan that you can and will commit to.Arm yourself with positive reinforcements and a plan to know what you will do on those days you feel like quitting.Each day, wipe the slate clean; revisit your why and take action on your written plan.Before long, you'll find yourself motivated and creating strong habits for success.Some ideas to help you stay motivated are by surrounding yourself with positivity. If you see positive posts on Social Media, are around positive people, you are more likely to be positive and continue to be motived towards a positive goal in your life.Create a vision board for yourself and look at it daily so you can really visualize what you are wanting to accomplish and what you will be able to reward yourself with, whether it be a new car, house, pay off debt or freedom to travel or spend more time with your kids. Visualizing it daily will help make those things happen for you.Also be sure not to compare yourself to others. We are all in different places in our lives and our journeys. You may be comparing your beginning to someone else's middle. That will just discourage you and set you up for failure. Move forward acknowledging your personal accomplishmentsAnd lastly, be kind to yourself. You are going to have bad days. Don't punish yourself for them. Pick up the next day and go at it again with a positive attitude knowing that it's ok to have those bad days every once in a while. Everyone does.Hope everyone has a great weekend!!!xoxo,Chanin

And this is me and my beautiful daughter, Olivia. She is the one who inspired me to become Vegan. She is very passionate about it and is taking college classes for Plant-Based Nutrition to get her certification to help other people live healthy lives by eating a plant-based diet. She is so inspiring and amazing and so knowledgeable. She spends her spare time reading and learning as much as she can about nutrition and veganism. She helped me make this entire ThanksLiving Meal for our family of 6. I'm so proud of her!!

Wednesday, November 25, 2015

So I'm 41 years old and I've never cooked a Thanksgiving meal. To some people that may sound strange, but in my family it's quite normal. The older generations are still at it. Still making the meals or in some cases, paying for the meals at a restaurant on Thanksgiving. Well, this year, I'm taking things into my own hands so that my family can eat how and what we want to eat. :)

A couple months ago we decided to go Vegan, for many, many reasons, which I won't get into in this post. But as you can imagine, that definitely causes issues for eating holiday meals with your non-vegan extended family. My oldest daughter found Mr. & Mrs. Vegan online and saw that they had an awesome thing they do for Thanksgiving. They celebrate THANKSLIVING instead and make their entire meal Vegan and no creature is killed in the making of their celebration of life and thanks. :) We all LOVED that idea and jumped on board right away! They have an amazing free e-book to download with a menu plan, shopping list and prep schedule that I am using.

I already began prepping last night by starting the Pumpkin Date Pie Crust and today I will be finishing the pie, pre-cutting all the veggies, boiling the potatoes and baking the butternut squash, making the mushroom gravy and preparing the ginger dressing. Tomorrow morning I will finish up and we will have ThanksLiving Lunch before going off to other relatives to visit in the evening (and taking our one leftovers to eat if they don't have anything we can fill our bellies with).

I know you are probably thinking, what's on a Vegan ThanksLiving Menu to eat, right? Well, let me show you:

Pumpkin Date Pie (with So Delicious Whipped Topping)

Apple Pie

Mashed Potatoes

Mushroom Gravy

Sensational Salad

Grateful Ginger Dressing

Thanksliving Stuffing

Green Bean Casserole

Wild Rice Pilaf

Dinner Rolls

Gardein Holiday Roast

Doesn't sound too crazy, does it? It's basically the same stuff I've always had, just without the meat and dairy. I've never been a Turkey fan, so I'm not going to miss eating turkey at all.

I will take pics of our Thanksliving meal tomorrow to share with you! I hope everyone has a terrific holiday!

Monday, November 9, 2015

I'm so excited to be participating in Meatless Monday (of course, we eat meatless every day), but I'm excited to share this with everyone and have other people joining me!

I've even created a Facebook Group so that we can share recipes and ideas! If you'd like to join me and my friends, click HERE!

I love this infographic from Gardein (and I love their products) so I thought I would share it also!

Wanna know what I'm making tonight for Meatless Monday? I'm making Cauliflower Wings and Homemade Baked Fries! Here is a link to the Cauliflower Wings I will be making! I'll let you know how they turn out!

The number one thing that stops most new distributors from getting started in their business or kills their business is fear of rejection. No one likes to hear no.

This can be a paralyzingly fear for many if we don't educate our new team partners on what to say, what to do and what to expect right from the start.

The key is to keep it very simple. Have a system in place and teach your team how to use the system.

A good system consists of -

Knowing how to contact and invite.

Knowing how to present the business using tools.

Knowing how to use third party credibility such as 3 way phone calls.

Knowing how to effectively follow up.

And, then prepare your new team partner to expect to hear some nos and get some resistance from some. This is okay. This is normal. Everyone goes through this.

So did Thomas Edison.

When people know what to, how to do it and what to expect, that paralyzing fear is greatly reduced.

Rejection is expected, so don't let it keep you from finding the lifestyle that you really want to live. There will be YES's, so take the chance and ask. All you have to do is reach out to people. If you truly believe in something, it will show and people will be more willing to listen. They may still reject you the first time, but don't give up. Use the system to follow up. In the end, we only regret the chances we didn't take.XOXO,Chaninwww.thrivewithchanin.com